The summary information in this report provides teachers, school administrators, students, and the general public in Alberta, Canada with an overview of results from the June 1998 administration of the English 30 Diploma Examination. The information in the report is most helpful when used in conjunction with the detailed school and jurisdiction…

This study compared the written products of four groups of 26 male students in grades 4-6, including 8 students identified as gifted, 6 learning-disabled/gifted, 6 learning-disabled, and 6 normal. The Test of Written Language-2 was administered and seven subtest scores were compared among the four groups. In general, the speculation that…

This booklet has two purposes: to illustrate and compare two important levels of expectation, or standards, set for the Alberta English 30 diploma examination writing (Satisfactory and Excellent) and to provide suggestions to help students move beyond the Satisfactory level by developing their unrealized writing potential. Sample papers from…

This booklet has two purposes: to illustrate and compare two important levels of expectation, or standards, set for the Alberta (Canada) English 33 diploma examination writing ("Satisfactory" and "Excellent") and to provide suggestions to help students move beyond the Satisfactory level developing their unrealized writing…

This study examined how the practice of prepublishing prompts used on the writing section of the Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) General Test impacts test-preparation behavior, test performance, test validity, and examinee perceptions of the value of prompt prepublication. Researchers imposed modest experimental control over how participants…

A study was conducted to investigate issues of test validation by placing them in a context. The study examined the ways in which instances of "good" and "poor" writing have been identified in the marking of part of an English writing test that is given each year to incoming Arts Faculty students at the University of Hong Kong.…

With the addition of a writing component to many high-stakes tests (e.g., college admission tests and high school exit exams), a review of writing accommodations for students with disabilities becomes critical. This paper reviews the accommodation policies of 20 states with high school exit exams of writing and three testing organizations that…

No longer little children, but not yet teenagers, tweens are beginning to see themselves as autonomous while still struggling to understand where they fit in. It can also be an awkward time for teachers who cherish the hilarious and poignant personalities of tween writers, but feel pressured by a new emphasis on testing in the intermediate grades.…

This paper reports the results of generalizability theory (G) analyses done for new writing and speaking tasks for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). For writing, a special focus was placed on evaluating the impact on the reliability of the number of raters (or ratings) per essay (one or two) and the number of tasks (one, two, or…

This document includes both a booklet and a presentation guide. The booklet contains the anchor papers used to score the 2001 Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) in writing, grade 4. Anchor papers are concrete examples that illustrate the intent of the scoring guides. The papers in the booklet exemplify the full range of score points…

This handbook was developed to assist teachers in monitoring and charting the progress of kindergarten and primary grade students in the Chicago, Illinois, public schools. It is a loose-leaf binder of formal and informal tools designed to provide teachers with ongoing information about students' learning so they can promote continuous growth…

This paper reports the results and educational implications of an experimental, comparative study evaluating the gains in overall writing quality in two groups of college freshmen composition students. The experimental group of 45 students learned to compose their first four of eight essays on the computer, while their professor intervened with…

Every year the state of North Carolina requires an English II writing test as part of the End of Course examinations. The purposes of the English II tests are to assess students' mastery of writing, application of grammatical skills, and achievement in literary analysis. This report contains information about the test performance of students in…

This study compared alternative measures of early writing performance with 15 second-grade students in a summer program for students at risk. Two- to three-minute samples were obtained of word copying, sentence copying, word dictation, and sentence dictation. Writing from word and sentence dictation correlated best with global judgments of…

Considers the development of an inter-rater reliability correlation comparing the judgments, or scores, or each judge to see if their observations are similar. Presents a case study of the Northville Public Schools' data for the 2000 MEAP (Michigan Educational Assessment Program) Writing Test. Concludes that in this case study the state fails both…